Can't sleep? Try eating more rice

Have trouble nodding off? Eating rice could help, suggests new research. In a study of nearly 2,000 people, the more rice they ate, the better they rated the quality of their sleep.

Researchers also compared how much bread or noodles were consumed, but the same link was not found.

Just how it works is not clear, but rice has a high glycaemic index or GI - a measure of how quickly carbohydrates are broken down into sugar in the blood. High GI foods increase levels of a protein called tryptophan that is used by the body to make the brain chemical serotonin, which is known to induce sleep.

Bread and noodles have a lower GI, which may be the key, concluded the researchers from Kanazawa Medical University, Japan.